Month: November 2017

StrideUp, a U.K. startup founded last year by Sakeeb Zaman and Rohan Trivedi, both formerly of Deutsche Bank, wants to make shared home ownership more readily available within the private housing sector. The company, which launched in the summer, lets you buy a portion of your home while you continue to rent the remainder. The

Co-working space giant WeWork will acquire Meetup, according to Crunchbase News. The report says Meetup chief executive officer and co-founder Scott Heiferman shared the news with employees at a company-wide meeting on Monday. WeWork declined to comment on the report. TechCrunch has also contacted Meetup. Reportedly now valued at $20 billion, WeWork raised a massive

French startup Doctolib is raising money for the second time in the past twelve months. The company is building a sort of Salesforce for the healthcare industry with a big emphasis on bookings. Doctolib just raised $42 million (€35 million) from Eurazeo and existing investor Bpifrance. The startup announced another round of funding back in

A SoftBank Group-led team of investors has made an offer to buy Uber’s shares in a tender offer that would value the company at about a 30% discount to Uber’s last private valuation of nearly $70 billion, a source with knowledge of the proposed deal tells TechCrunch. We’re hearing that the proposed price per share

Researchers at Duke University, OSU and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have solved one of the biggest problems with new forms of quantum encryption: quantum key distribution. QKD is the process of distributing keys during a transmission and in a way that will tell both sides of the conversation that someone is eavesdropping. The new system,

It’s been just ten days since Stitch Fix debuted on the stock market, and it has risen almost 54 percent since that time. It’s an astonishing feat for the fashion styling business, which got off to a rough start, but quickly turned things around as it started to gain momentum by its third day of trading and soared

Lucid, one of the companies that looks like it could have the best chance to potentially field a true all-electric competitor to Tesla’s Model S, is moving its headquarters to a new facility in Newark, California — one with twice the space of its current base of operations in Menlo Park. The new headquarters is intended

There are now 15 million people doing Tom Nook’s grunt work. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp marked Nintendo’s most significant mobile title launch since Mario Run and it seems like the game has already delivered some significant downloads, with data from SensorTower suggesting that the title, which lets users chat with animals, catch fish and shake

Sadly, not all of the Pixel 2’s surprises have been the good sort since Google’s latest flagship launched. Visual Core is one of the more pleasant ones, though — a custom system-on-a-chip (SoC) that’s just been hanging out in the phone not really doing much of anything. It seemed that the component simply wasn’t ready

Microsoft Office is now available for Google Chromebook users through the Google Play Store – a notable addition, given the two companies offer competing products in terms of office productivity software. Neither Google nor Microsoft are making a formal announcement about the Office applications’ arrival on Chromebooks. But we understand the Office Android apps will

Fans are stoked for a fourth season of Black Mirror, as they should be. The Emmy-award winning series, which shows the dark side of our inevitable future, does an outstanding job of story-telling while encapsulating an entire plot line in a single episode at a time. But Netflix is keeping its cards close to the

Over the holiday weekend, The New York Times found that one of its Twitter accounts had been locked. @nytimesworld was frozen for a full 24 hours over an innocuous tweet about a story in which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for the country’s treatment of indigenous school children. Twitter restored the account Sunday afternoon,

As YouTube reels from a series of scandals related to its lack of policing around inappropriate content aimed at children, obscene comments on videos of children, horrifying search suggestions, and more, a new app called Jellies has arrived to offer parents a safer way to let their kids watch videos on mobile devices. Jellies was

ClimaCell, a weather forecasting technology that uses wireless networks to create incredibly granular predictions, has raised $15 million to develop new products and expand beyond the U.S. The Boston-based company’s service has broad applications across government and business, offering ways to better prepare for the increasing number of severe weather events that are occurring worldwide. “Nearly

This is software to save lives. Facebook’s new “proactive detection” artificial intelligence technology will scan all posts for patterns of suicidal thoughts, and when necessary send mental health resources to the user at risk or their friends, or contact local first-responders. By using AI to flag worrisome posts to human moderators instead of waiting for user

A few years ago jailbreaking your iPhone was all the rage. The cat-and-mouse game of hackers versus Apple was great fun and some of the open source products available to jailbreakers – namely the Cydia alternative app store – added amazing features and customizability to the iPhone. Some devs even launched only on jailbroken phones,

YouTube is firefighting another child safety content moderation scandal which has led several major brands to suspend advertising on its platform. On Friday investigations by the BBC and The Times reported finding obscene comments on videos of children uploaded to YouTube. Only a small minority of the comments were removed after being flagged to the company

Anything you can do, AI can do better. Eventually. On October 12, NASA put on its own demonstration, pitting an AI-piloted racing drone against world-renowned drone pilot Ken Loo. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who have spent the last two years working on drone autonomy (which was funded by Google), built three custom drones

European VCs are getting tired, and who can blame them. Europe’s startup industry has boomed in the last ten years, and no-one can say it isn’t a world away from what it was in previous decades. However, European founders are consistently getting it wrong in how they allocate options and equity to staff. This is

Image-hosting site turned meme social network, Imgur, is the latest tech service to ‘fess up to a security breach. In a blog post Friday it revealed that hackers had compromised its systems in 2014, with ~1.7M emails and passwords affected. No additional information was apparently compromised in the breach. “Imgur has never asked for real names,

Video is what consumers are paying attention to these days, and Amazon’s AWS is hoping to capitalise on that with one of its latest launches. Doubling down on its video services for media companies, app publishers — and actually any other organization that has considered launching a video service — Amazon today announced a new suite

The Nordic Web, a research and analysis company which specialises in covering data on tech companies emerging out of the Nordic region, has started a new Angel fund. The fund will invest across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Founder Neil Murray says ‘The Nordic Web Angel Fund’ plans to invest in 10-15 Nordic startups

The UK government has announced it will introduce draft legislation in the spring aimed at preventing unsafe or criminal use of drones. Last year it ran a public consultation that recommended addressing safety, security and privacy challenges around drone technology. Among the measures planned for the forthcoming Drone Bill plus secondary legislation amendments the government

We’d heard months ago that Amazon would be using its Re:Invent AWS event to roll out some a new service related to building in mixed reality — augmented reality and virtual reality. And on the eve of the conference kicking off, it’s done just that. Today the company announced Amazon Sumerian, a new platform for

At Disrupt Berlin, we have a special treat for attendees who want to engage with our main stage speakers and other experts on the big topics in the tech and startup world. We call these Off the Record sessions (OTRs). Although technically not ‘off the record,’ they are a great opportunity to ask our speakers

Simon Lee, founder and CEO of Flitto Artificial intelligence-powered translation is becoming an increasingly crowded category, with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook all working on their own services. But tech still isn’t a match for professional human translations and machine-generated results are often hit-and-miss. One online translation service, Flitto, is now focused on providing other

I’ve been thinking about token sale marketing lately mostly because it’s been so bad. I’ve gotten hundreds of emails asking me to be an ICO advisor or evangelist or influencer primarily because the ICO marketing techniques come to us straight out of the spammiest corners of affiliate marketing. I’ve gotten emails from founders who have